George Clooney and Julia Roberts find themselves at the mercy of a crazed Jack O’Connell in the first trailer for the thriller Money Monster.

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Directed by Jodie Foster, the film pits Ocean’s Eleven actors Roberts and Clooney against the star of Angelina Jolie’s earnest Oscar-bait Unbroken, in a story that promises to make reference to the ever-widening wealth gap in the US.

O’Connell plays a blue-collar worker, driven to violence by his financial losses, who takes a TV presenter, played by Clooney, hostage while his money-centred show is live on air, before forcing him to strap on a bomb that could blow the studio sky-high. Roberts plays his understandably concerned producer.

“It’s where your deepest, darkest shames evolve and play out in three acts,” Foster told Yahoo! “That’s something that’s very strong in the movie and that appealed to me: watching these two men, who you start out thinking that they’re one thing, and then you watch them change through the course of meeting each other and engaging with each other.”

Soundtracked by Bruce Springsteen, the trailer offers up a tense if familiar predicament, before turning into something like a public service announcement about the evils of investment banking, with a smarmy Dominic West as the CEO of a company linked to the situation.

In handling the financial crash, it follows the Oscar-tipped comedy drama The Big Short, which starred Christian Bale as a ruthless hedge-fund manager. Foster said she wanted Money Monster to showcase a system that is “rigged for the elite”.